Overall, our philosophy has been to create a system that has killer features for both IFR and VFR aircraft while tailoring exact features to the way that our products are most likely to be installed with other products. The way this roughly always breaks down in the world is:
VFR pilot: Doesn't care about VORs anymore, doesn't even have a NAV radio installed, and doesn't see any value in an IFR-capable GPS. For navigation, SkyView focuses on supporting these pilots well by having a robust, ever-evolving internal mapping and navigation engine. It tends to not emulate the features and services that an actual NAV radio or IFR navigator can provide.
IFR pilot: Has SkyView plus either a NAV radio (or two, in some cases), and in many cases, an IFR GPS or GPS/NAV or GPS/NAV/COM. For these pilots, we focus on having SkyView do the best things it possibly can to complement the features of the equipment that they'll probably have on board for IFR. So on SkyView's side, this includes things like dual data bus redundancy for the various SkyView modules, with alerting when something goes wrong - say when a wire breaks - without compromising capability; support for multiple ADAHRS, with annunciation and problem-solving comparison tools when your flight instruments (ADAHRS) don't agree with one another; reversionary mode for multi-display systems so that your workload doesn't drastically increase when you're left with only one display in-flight; purpose-built Li-ion backup batteries that are designed to save you when your electrical system fails you, etc etc. Almost none of these features that we think are core to SkyView's IFR capabilities are offered by anyone else.
So we think we serve the IFR community rather well. You're absolutely right the SkyView is not really designed to provide IFR-like navigation capabilities, by itself, for aircraft that aren't equipped with the equipment you'd need to fly IFR. Maybe there's something to those scenarios and we should think harder about capabilities in aircraft that aren't actually equipped for IFR, but franky, I'm not seeing the value for most people. And there's complexity there, especially as you create capabilities that look an awful lot like the "real" capabilities (like virtualized approaches to any point), but that could fairly easily be misunderstood by pilots that don't have a nuanced view of the differences. We try really hard to not introduce this sort of confusion into the product.
So while I'm sorry that SkyView isn't everything you wish it would be today, we do really think that we bring the capabilities that most pilots are after, and we're proud of that. SkyView is always evolving, too, and so does our thinking. Take a look at some of our press releases from just a year or two ago to see how far SkyView has come in just that amount of time. We'll keep trying to win you over
Happy New Year!
Michael Schofield
Marketing Manger
Dynon Avionics